Talk:Proposed features/centre zone

What is this all about?

The problem is, that there is land, where it's not easy to name the proper landuse. Am I correct? What you do is introduce a new property, saying it is a centre_zone. That centre_zone might or might not be historical. To sum this up, it is just a tag, which says, there is nothing (meaningful) to tag (for that large area).
I understand your desire to tag everything properly, but creating a property which does not hold any new information wouldn't make it any better.
-- BearT 18:38, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

So the landuse-tag is used to indicate the main usage of an area, which might be residential, commercial or anything else. Centre_zone would be in most cases a mixture of commercial and residential, since there are flats and stores, but usually no industry. I'd use the landuse=residential tag as long as there are e.g. flats in a house and shops on the street level of the same house. I use landuse=commercial only for business parks, when there is clearly no residential use in that area. My problem with the city_centre tag is it implies a certain location within a city, namely the centre, but uses that as an indicator for landuse. So when is it ok to use city_centre? In a city centre which is only used commercially? Or in every area which mixes shops with flats but outside of the actual city centre? And additionally the landuse only indicates the *main* usage of an area. So if there are three or four levels of flats and shops on the ground floor (I guess that's what city_centre tries to say) it seems perfectly OK tag it as residential area, especially since the shops are tagged as shop=* anyway. --BearT 12:28, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

feel free to tag whatever you want, but from an urbanistic point of view there is definitely a huge difference between a city-center and an residential area. Not everywhere, where people a living, is also a residential area. I would recommend with this proposal to tag only mainly residential areas a so, and highly densified city centers with it's own tag. It is indeed common practise in the mapping world to distinguish mixed use citycenters from pure residential areas and it is also additional value for the user of the map to see this.

to answer some of your questions:

So when is it ok to use city_centre?

-> in all cases named in the definition, usually it is much harder to define city-center then to name it. Everybody knows where the city-center is, when you ask them.

In a city centre which is only used commercially?

-> depends on your personal definition of centre, but would be hard to find this in Europe anyway, or: please define commercially

Or in every area which mixes shops with flats but outside of the actual city centre?

-> no, not outside the "actual city_centre", it is a tag for the "actual city centre". Your question already indicates, that you know as well where the centre is ;-)

And additionally the landuse only indicates the *main* usage of an area. So if there are three or four levels of flats and shops on the ground floor (I guess that's what city_centre tries to say) it seems perfectly OK tag it as residential area, especially since the shops are tagged as shop=* anyway.

-> the proposal also names administration, culture and so on. If every house has shops in the ground floor that would indeed be a good indice for a centre. These indicate for example, that there will also be much more people on the street than in a residential area, that there will be more parking space, and so on...

Of course do I know the city centre of my hometown. But all your description would also fit to the shopping streets in my hometown. They have everything, except they are not directly in the centre. So I'm not against a landuse=urban tag or something like that, but as far as I understand centre could be only used once per town, but all the other named features would fit maybe about 5 or 10 times per town. -- BearT 19:59, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

What do you mean by "shopping street"? The way I understand centre_zone, it can in some cases also be used more than one time, in cases of polycentric structures. (Example Berlin in german:
[1]
)

Call it ignorant, but I don't really see a difference (except the size) between Berlin and any other grown city, that grows/grew around smaller villages which originally are/were outside the town.

indeed, I used Berlin as an example, but of course this is valid for all polycentric structures (which in most cases go back to several villages). -- Dieterdreist 19:38, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

At the moment such districts/villages/towns are tagged as points and landuse city_centre would then be an area around this point? Am I understanding you correctly?
My "shopping streets" are streets, where every house has a shop on the ground floor, and a mixture of bureaus and flats above and in the side streets. Those areas once may have been real centres of a neighbouring city. But the farther you are away from the street (which really is just one street, sometimes one or two special side streets) the more residential the area is.
As I'm from Vienna I had a few streets from there in mind, namely the Mariahilfer Straße and the Neubaugasse as shopping streets and the Spittelberg as a cultural district. Are all those now centre_zones? Should (in case of Vienna) the whole first district be one big centre_zone? Generally it's easy to name a centre (as a point) but I don't see a clear border where a centre_zone ends. At least (in Vienna) not anywhere near the centre. -- BearT 20:15, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I would say, in historical cities like Vienna it should be all the area inside the "Ring". Every City has its specialties, so it's not possible to tell you a rule for every place, but normally the locals can tell you instantly, where the center (Zentrum) is. In terms of planning regulations this feature should apply to what is called "Kerngebiet" in German. Dieterdreist 19:38, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

There's still a need for this

This discussion seems to be dormant, but I think there's still a clear need for something along these lines. Most cities, towns and even villages have intensively used central areas which are an genuine mix of retail, residential, commercial and sometimes even industrial uses. As already pointed out, this can apply to both the centre of a town/city itself and/or suburban centres within an urban agglomeration. For these areas it is wrong to just try to pick one of these existing landuse tags- any of them would be very misleading. Look at London: the suburbs are extensively tagged for landuse, but the entire central area is left blank. Why? Because there's no accepted landuse tag that comes close to describing how this area is used. I don't think use of this tag would cause any real problem- any area where any one single use is predominant could be tagged one of the existing landuse tags.

The only problem I have with this proposal is the actual tag chosen. 'Central_zone' conjures up (in my mind at least) a 'zone' as in town planning scheme; this could cause confusion. Town/city centres are called different things in different countries- eg. 'downtown' in the USA, 'CBD' in Australia, 'high street' or 'city centre' in the UK. I think landuse=central_area would cover it without too much ambiguity. --SDavies 14:32, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

I just used this tag in my home town (Vigevano, Italy). I think that in Europe the centre zone is usually identified as the area inhabited before the introduction of a land-use planning, so we have an historic information (building are in average from '800 or older), a not-so-clear landuse (shop on the ground floor, and a mixture of bureaus and flats above) and an high concentration of public amenities.--Joker87 (talk) 23:46, 3 March 2015 (UTC)